Heard@GDC: no Unreal Engine 3 on Revolution

by Christopher Grant on Mar 28th 2006 1:00AM

During a Q&A session following a demonstration of their new Unreal Engine 3, Epic Games' Mark Rein said, "It won't be easy to take something HD res here to the Revolution," continuing we probably "won't be seeing Unreal Engine 3 on the Revolution."

Although he was clear to say that he has not seen the final hardware for the Revolution, Rein said the existing Unreal Engine 2 would provide more than enough muscle to take full advantage of the Revolution's hardware since it won't require HD resolution.

Naturally, nothing's been announced, so despite the fact this came from Epic's VP, consider it unconfirmed. Any geeks in the house care to pontificate on whether or not UE3 is in fact worth it for Revolution developers?

See also:
Revolution can handle Unreal Engine 3
Mark Rein to consider Unreal Engine 3 for Revolution
Nintendo responds to Epic's Revolution disdain
Epic VP rips on Revolution concept

(UPDATE: To prevent further confusion, I'll attempt to clarify what I think Mr. Rein was saying. The process of porting UE3 games running in HD from platforms like PC, Xbox 360, or PS3 to the Revolution "won't be easy" and therefore, he suspects, won't be done. He elaborated that licensing Unreal Engine 3 for a Revolution game would probably be overkill, since Unreal Engine 2 is already capable of maxing out what they perceive the system to be capable of.

That being said, what about the streamlined scripting and animation tools bundled into Unreal Engine 3's Kismet? Wouldn't some developers gladly pay the increased licensing fees to work in a refined development environment that, according to Epic, could cut their development costs. Furthermore, some developers, like Midway, have purchased studio-wide licenses to develop all their next-gen titles with UE3, presumably their Revolution titles as well.

I think mocax got it right, "Epic's writes software graphics/game engines. Nintendo makes a machine that allows developers to deviate from Epic's core business. Any self-respecting profit-oriented corporation will twitch at Nintendo's disruption." I suspect we will see UE3 on some Revolution titles, but the idea is antithetical to Nintendo's stated ideology and thereby threatening to a company that makes their money selling eye candy.

Tags: Epic Games, EpicGames, GDC, Mark Rein, MarkRein, Unreal Engine 3, UnrealEngine3, Wii

Reader Comments (52)

A major trend I am seeing in the replies here is that people are commenting about how lower resolution on the Rev means that it will only look marginally better than UE2. That is not the point, the point is that UE3 is a completely updated set of developer tools, not only is it important for UE3 to run on Rev for portability reasons, but as was mentioned in the update to the original post, it is important for cutting down developer costs. When a new SDK of any kind comes out, it often streamlines numerous processes cutting down development time and cost. If UE2 is the "Epic Engine of Choice" for the Rev then they are actually causing developers to have a longer development time and higher costs. This will not go over well with many Nintendo faithful dev studios I suspect. Another thing to keep in mind is that the PS3 and Xbox360 do not REQUIRE you to play games in high def, for a good reason I might add. Not everyone in the world has a high def TV, so if the graphics are going to look like garbage if they arent high def, then I guess the majority of the population is going to be seeing UE3 based games in a crappy light.

In response to:
"Yes, but take Donkey Kong Country off the list. The graphics for that game could have been done since the beginning. It's just that the SOURCE of the graphics weren't thought of....All DKC did was take pre-rendered backgrounds and save it as a bitmap. The only difference it made on the Super Nintendo is that the sprites WEREN'T made pixel by pixel but rather have the models captured into sprites. "

This is not correct. In fact its bckwards. The "source" of the graphics (pre rendered stills, animations, and palette optimizers) has been around for years before the SNES. I used them at college before donkeykong country was a glimmer in rare's eye, and people have been using them since before that.

And no, it could not have been done from the beginning - not because there was a hardware change, but because no one figured out how to pull off the real-time sprite DECOMPRESSION that made it possible for so many frames of animation -- and with so many colors -- to be played back on the screen at a good framerate. The second innovation was getting the SNES to display 512 colors per frame instead of 256, and then manipulating it further to produce unparalleled lighting effects. And these techniques were not only applied to the sprites, but also to the tile tables used to build the various scrolls of scenery.

"The only thing about the SNES that Donkey Kong Country pushed is the color palette buddy. There were no technical boundaries other than that."

Sorry "buddy", you're wrong.

"Impossible? HA! I wonder who was dumb enough to believe that."

Nice.

-Josh

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